As marketers, we spend a lot of time talking about branding and positioning. I'm not going to go deep on each of those here, but I wanted to share a few ideas about how we think of these concepts for our own business.
First, I am a big fan of David C. Baker's work, particularly, The Business of Expertise. If you're not into books, check his Insights and 2Bobs. While his audience is creative entrepreneurs, there's plenty of applicability to lawyers, who are also in the business of expertise.
Second, we run on our version of the Entrepreneurial Operating System. The EOS framework includes a marketing strategy with the following components:
For this post, we're going to focus on our 3 Uniques.
As EOS acknowledges, the idea of 3 Uniques is just their way of talking about differentiation and value propositions. Essentially, they're the three things taken together that you do, that no one else can (or very few others can).
In other words: What three things together make you uniquely qualified to help your clients?
Here are ours: Monthly. Exclusive. Results.
Monthly
We don't do long-term contracts. This makes us accountable for communicating the value of what we're doing for our clients on a monthly basis. As you may have already experienced, this is not the norm for digital legal marketing agencies.
Exclusive
We won't work with our clients' local competitors. SEO is a winner-takes-most game and we just believe that this creates too much conflict of interest. As lawyers, you should get this. Again, not that common in digital legal marketing.
Results
At the end of the day, what no one else can copy is our results. That's because they're based on our knowledge, skill, and experience. No one else has that. Our process for understanding our clients' business, creating a plan, and forecast and executing against it, is ours alone. Many of our competitors either sell deliverables or indirect marketing metrics (impressions, clicks, likes, etc).
We regularly revisit our 3 Uniques to scrutinize and refine them. It's an ongoing process of improvement.
We believe these help us stand out in a crowded market and we've been validated in this belief with feedback from both prospective clients and actual clients.
So, what are your 3 Uniques? What makes you uniquely qualified to help your clients. Hint: It's not how hard you fight.
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